Marco Brambilla Interviewed By Elena Soboleva

Date posted: December 6, 2012Author: jolanta

Elena Soboleva: You have collaborated with Ferrari, the Standard Hotel, and Kanye West for his music video “Power,” so your work is seen by people beyond the standard art crowd. Does your background in film make it more of a priority for you to reach a broader audience?

Marco Brambilla: I think the film background is more about the technical aspects of the work and my practice. A lot of my work from film informs the method with which I make art. I don’t think it’s an intentional thing and though I do like to have more people see my work it’s not an overriding concern.

Elena Soboleva: You have collaborated with Ferrari, the Standard Hotel, and Kanye West for his music video “Power,” so your work is seen by people beyond the standard art crowd. Does your background in film make it more of a priority for you to reach a broader audience?

Marco Brambilla: I think the film background is more about the technical aspects of the work and my practice. A lot of my work from film informs the method with which I make art. I don’t think it’s an intentional thing and though I do like to have more people see my work it’s not an overriding concern.

The commission at the Standard Hotel (Evolution) actually opened at a gallery before and it just happened that it is the one piece people see most because it is at the Standard which is kind of frustrating. It would be nice not to have it exposed in the elevator so much.

Ferrari came to me with another commission. I make five or six different works a year and one of them is a commission and in the case of last year’s Miami Basel my commission work happened to be for Ferrari.

ES: Do you feel video art as a medium is more accessible and relatable because people are generally more equipped to read it in some way?

MB: I guess so, but it’s a double-edged sword. In some ways it is less collectable because it is interpreted in some ways as being commodified. I think in time-based pieces you really have to create a sensibility or a whole experience that is not reproducible in some ways. The challenge is when people expect to see samples of work online or they expect to see things on DVDs. It is very hard to communicate the vastness of the works because my video is essentially installation work, so whether it’s a big 3D installation or if it’s a video sculpture, it’s all meant to be viewed in a gallery space or a venue that is specifically adapted to show it. That is the real challenge.

So, it is more accessible in some ways but what makes it accessible is that it can be more entertaining in tone. That becomes a drawback because you can’t be as specific about the way it is shown. As an artist you are more limited, in terms of people looking at the work, and often it is not representative of the effect you desired to create.

ES: Your work is represented on Youtube. One can see all of Civilization, and some parts of your other videos. Does that relate to viewers in a different way and what are your thoughts about that?

MB: I would rather it not be on Youtube personally. Civilization was a leaked video and we’ve been trying to pull it down but people keep putting it back up…I would prefer it if I could be in control of all my content.

ES: You are now based in New York but you previously lived in Los Angeles. Do you find the work is received differently between the two places?

MB: It seems that there is a much more compressed and close knit collector community in New York than there is in L.A. Here, you are in proximity with more collectors and more art dealers, whereas in L.A there are more artists, so in a way it is a more relaxing place to work because you are not so close to the distribution networks. In New York it is more challenging because you are constantly coming into contact with the distribution system for your work.

ES: Evolution was the first 3D ‘fine artwork’ ever made. Do you plan to continue working in the medium?

MB: The 3D is only as a result of the Megaplex triptych of sampled moving collages, in case of Evolution, most of the films we were sampling were in 3D. The idea of releasing this kind of hyper-spectacle work in 3D made a lot of sense.

ES: Are these collage elements that you sample meant to be recognized by the audience or are they meant to be without an identifiable referent?

MB: I started with more generic aims and as I worked on the three pieces, became bolder and bolder about having them more recognizable, especially as milestones within the piece. Some characters stand out and were meant to ‘pop out of the canvas’ though I have used a mix of both. In the first piece there are few recognizable elements and in the second and third there are even more.

ES: What are the ones people recognize the most?

MB: The marshmallow man…Arnold Schwarzenegger.

ES: What do you see as the evolution of time-based and video art? Where do you see the medium going?

MB: I think that technology is eventually just going to disappear. Projection and display technology is getting so sophisticated that it is becoming more and more invisible. You will be able to make video sculptures where you are unaware of the technology and only aware that it is time based and there is movement in it; it’s the opposite of the way a lot of artists in the 1960’s and 1970’s, like Nam June Paik, used to fetishize the actual machinery. Machinery became sculptural. Now in my work the inverse is true, where it is about not seeing any technology at all.

ES: So you see your work as antithetical to the structuralist films? Do you see this inclination towards a new hyper-collage element in relation to the works of Ryan Trecartin, Christian Marclay, and even Cory Arcangel?

MB: Cory Arcangel is very different stylistically but in concept more similar than Ryan Trecartin. He is more current and becomes the medium he is satirizing. Christian Marclay is more conceptual in some ways, though I relate to his works more than the other two.

ES: Going back to your previous point on the evolution of video art, how would you place these artists in trying to ‘eliminate the medium’?

MB: By that, I only meant in presentation—the physical presentation of video art. In terms of the content, I think it’s as diverse as it’s ever been and probably going to become more diverse and less categorized. All of these artists work in different ways but I think Marclay tends to be more formal, more constructed, and easiest for me to wrap my head around because he probably approaches the work similar to how I sample pieces, through a stream of consciousness.

ES: Is there a certain nostalgia to the fact that you pull these old film clips and return to the 3D glasses in works like Evolution?

MB: The 3D was simply a way to view and comment on the spectacle. The film is very similar to turn of the century theatre when theatre was becoming spectacle and narrative was being disposed of. Now most mainstream cinema and content you see at cineplexes is interchangeable and almost irrelevant to the viewer’s experience. It’s more of a marketing spectacle—packaging and marketing a sensation. Certain types of films almost have to be released in 3D or Imax. Because of the subject matter, it’s expected for them to be deployed that way.

ES: You talk about ‘the spectacle’ and there is a lot of discussion about contemporary art shifting towards that. What do you see it as?

MB: The collectors have changed. There is definitely more money and collecting in the art world as a result of status-seeking as opposed to being informed or loving the art itself. Art fairs are becoming more dominant which follows that collectors are able to be more efficient about the way they collect work and more visible about it as well.

ES: There’s always a greater overarching human element to your videos. Is your work based on specific historical narratives or philosophies?

MB: The two pieces you mentioned earlier—Evolution and Civilization—are based on specific events. Evolution is a chronological mapping of human history loosely based on a museum of natural history and what it would look like if it was a video mural. Civilization has more of a religious-morality bent. It’s basically a retelling of that story in the most “fuck you” way possible.

ES: Can you tell me what you’re working on now?

MB: It’s a video collage about the end of the NASA space program. I shot the last space shuttle to come back from orbit the day before it was refurbished in order to be displayed in a museum. It’s kind of an archaeological examination of the manned space program and the end of that era.